Description
Book SynopsisThis volume, with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose, discusses the foundations of computation in relation to nature.It focuses on two main questions:The contributors are world-renowned experts who have helped shape a cutting-edge computational understanding of the universe. They discuss computation in the world from a variety of perspectives, ranging from foundational concepts to pragmatic models to ontological conceptions and philosophical implications.The volume provides a state-of-the-art collection of technical papers and non-technical essays, representing a field that assumes information and computation to be key in understanding and explaining the basic structure underpinning physical reality. It also includes a new edition of Konrad Zuse's “Calculating Space” (the MIT translation), and a panel discussion transcription on the topic, featuring worldwide experts in quantum mechanics, physics, cognition, computation and algorithmic complexity.The volume is dedicated to the memory of Alan M Turing — the inventor of universal computation, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, and is part of the Turing Centenary celebrations.
Table of ContentsFoundations, Universality & Early Models: Visual Realization of Universal Computation (Harvey Friedman); Specification and Computation (Raymond Turner); The Many Forms of Amorphous Computational Systems (Jiri Wiedermann); Physics, Computation & the Computation of Physics: Computational Realizability in the Real World (Andrej Bauer); What is Ultimately Possible in Physics? (Stephen Wolfram); The Computable Universe Hypothesis (Matthew Szudzik); Computation in Nature & the World: Bacteria, Turing Machines and Hyperbolic Cellular Automata (Maurice Margenstern); Computing on Rings (Genaro Martinez & Andy Adamatzky); Computation in Unorganized Systems (Christof Teuscher); The Quantum & Computation: What is Computation? (How) Does Nature Compute? (David Deutsch); Computational Aspects of Quantum Reality (Adan Cabello); Self-Reference, Computability, and Quantum Mechanics (Thomas Breuer & Thomas Schulte-Herbrueggen); and other papers.
